Many people don't believe that everything is connected. It's strange. They believe in magnets, in electromagnetic waves, in quantum action at a distance. They believe that the force of gravity makes the Earth revolve around the Sun, and yet they do not believe that the same forces can influence the smaller details of our fate. They believe that it is all up to them. That they have free will. They say that Jupiter can gently pull the Sun, yet it cannot move our infinitely smaller souls.

A paradox.

The stars are difficult to read, for sure. The horoscopes in the newspaper are wishy-washy nonsense written by lowly paid interns who do not have an inkling of physics or differential equations—you would not expect someone to be able to predict the weather without a doctorate and a powerful computer, would you? This is no different.

As a mathemastrologer, I can see the strings with which the cosmic puppeteers ordain our every move. I can follow their course, untangle their knots. This is how I have been able to read my own future for the past ten years. I knew prior to conception that I would become pregnant, and that it would be a boy. I saw my mother's death in the conjunction of Saturn and Venus, right before a car accident plucked her out of the numbers of the living.

One month ago, I read the death of my six year old son in the firmament.

As unwavering as it used to be, my faith was shaken.

In astrology, but I suppose this is true of other disciplines, you get attached to the objects of your work. You come to love the intricate play of the planets with your own fate, the way that your mood ebbs in sync with Neptune's tempests or gets lifted by the tides. I was married to the cosmos—but that day, the idyll was shattered. The cosmos had betrayed my trust. It had been difficult to accept my mother's death, to see it coming without interfering, but I had told myself that this moment comes for everyone. This, though, I could not abide. It was too cruel. Dear little Patrick, the star around which my life revolved, could not be extinguished, not now, not ever. I would rather do without the rest of the universe.

I started to believe in free will. Not out of logic, but out of necessity. There had to be a way to save him.

I poured myself in calculations, poured my life savings into computing power, sat night and day at my desk to find out precisely how and when Patrick would die. “He will drown in the pool,” the stars said. Very well—I drained the pool. But fighting fate was like trying to contain water within a sieve: if you plugged one hole, the water would simply drip from another. Still, I thought, there was a finite number of them: could I not plug all holes? I had to be strong, clever, steady, relentless, exhaustive. How was Patrick going to die, now that the pool was empty? Drown in the bathtub? I locked the bathroom. Drown in a friend's pool? Let's not go to their place, then. Drown in the lake? Let's not go to the lake. Soon enough, there remained no possibility of drowning.

The firmament still wanted Patrick's soul to rise up into its clutches, though. Fall down the stairs? I confined him to the first floor. Choke on food? I blended it into puree. The star map became more and more erratic in its dogged attempts to murder my child, threatening anything from an exploding oven (let's not cook) to plague rats (they cannot bite through five inches of padding). The signs became more and more numerous, culminating into a singularity at midnight when the dangers would number into the millions. After that, I could not tell, but I was determined to find out. I would fight off an infinite number of threats for Patrick's sake. At midnight, he would be alive and I would have asserted my free will, in defiance of the cosmos.

Six hours before midnight, someone banged at my door, insistently. I tried my best to ignore it, but I saw it was my colleague Olaf, the most brilliant mathemastrologer I knew, and a small part of my mind wanted to hear him out. I opened up a sliver.

“What is it?”

“Sonia,” he said, wringing his hands nervously, “whatever you are doing, please stop.”

“Stop what?”

“Stop, uh… You cannot save him. It is Written.”

“No,” I sneered. “I am his mother. Do not tell me what I can or cannot do.”

I stared him down. Blessedly, the stars foresaw no harm would come to me, which meant that he could not force his way in or do anything rash to stop me, lest he violated the celestial plan to the same degree that I was going to. I felt like a chess Grandmaster.

“Please, Sonia, please,” he pleaded, literally falling to his knees as he did so. “You have no idea what forces you are meddling with.”

I knew exactly what forces I was meddling with. I was meddling with the Sun (330,000 Earths), with Saturn (95 Earths), with Jupiter (318 Earths). If their combined masses couldn't stop me, that was their problem, not mine. I did what I had to do: I slammed the door in his face.

“Free will exists, Olaf,” I yelled through the wood for his edification, “and I will prove it.”

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